The Black nationalist leader’s Pan-African movement is echoed in X’s own principles, treating Black and brown oppression as a global issue. The documentary also presents details about Malcolm X’s parents, who followed Marcus Garvey. He latches on to how Muhammad Ali, who was then known as Cassius Clay, would have been affected in transformative ways by the lynching of Emmett Till, comparing that experience to how Black youth today respond to images of police brutality. If Roberts and Smith’s book connected the dots to give the relationship between X and Ali shape, Clarke’s documentary colours it all in with an understanding of what it means to be Black in America. Clarke adds that he saw an opportunity to balance the scholarly work of Roberts and Smith with more intimate accounts from those close to X and Ali, while exploring social and cultural details that the book doesn’t consider to the same extent. “Whether they’re white or Black, there’s a lot of value in the research,” says Clarke, who was born in Brooklyn to Jamaican parents. And in an era where authorship and identity packs so much meaning and implication, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that the two authors are white.
Roberts and Smith also appear in the film. “And that’s something I don’t think people have necessarily seen before.”īlood Brothers, which is produced by the creator of Black-ish, Kenya Barris, adapts Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith’s book about X and Ali’s relationship, drawn from heavy research into past biographies, documents and FBI surveillance records. “There’s just this admiration and joy being shared between the two of them,” Clarke told the Guardian over a Zoom call from his LA home. He was also a soft sponge when it came to learning from a spiritual father figure and friend like X. And then there’s Muhammad Ali: he had a loud mouth too, but as heavyweight champion, he made the world shake with his rock-hard fists. We get a sense of Malcolm X’s ferocity with words but also his tenderness and vulnerability among brethren. But in his Netflix documentary, Clarke digs further into the men and their environment, with archival material and first-hand accounts from X’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz, Ali’s younger brother Rahman and several others who knew them or understood the political and social environment they were up against.
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